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2 books match the query 'Messenger'
Feet of the Messenger
poemsH. C. Palmer
BkMk Press, 2017
Winner, Kansas Notable Book
Balcones Poetry Prize Finalist
Feet of the Messenger explores H.C. Palmer’s experiences as a medical doctor, especially as an army surgeon in the Vietnam War, and his feelings for and memories of his native Kansas, especially the Flint Hills. Although he has only been writing poetry for ten years, Palmer’s work reflects decades of discovering how the war kept coming back to him, even on the prairie.
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The Messenger
Stephanie Pippin
University of Iowa Press, 2013
In thrilling poems of metamorphosis and birth, death and dissolution, Stephanie Pippin’s debut collection returns us to a world unshorn of wildness. Delivering accident and hunger, love and grief, nature in these poems is beautiful and brutal, “a hellish magnificence” that both invites and denies the meanings we project onto it. Refusing the domesticated comfort of our usual myths, Pippin reminds us of our place as creatures among others in a world where “what isn’t dead / is dying,” and where the thrill of predatory flight commingles with the desperation of the prey.
This mesmerizing and astonishingly assured collection offers a message as harrowing as it is essential. Faced with the hard master of necessity—“angel stinking of his own / excitement”—and bare before what Mallarmé called “the horror of the forest,” we are helpless, finally, to do anything to save what we love. Our sole task, these poems insist, is to look on while we can, and to love harder. [more]